car customers: BAMBOOZLED

It’s long been fashionable to criticize U.S. auto firms. Much of it has been warranted and I’ve done my share:

• For too long, Fords burned oil at 50K miles—the day after you got the title. Growing up, over the 15 minutes it took to start one up, our whole yard turned blue.
• GM cars had nebulous aesthetics, poor reliability and lacked the gas economy of foreign cars.
• Chrysler had a special talent for ugly.

I’ve evolved, as have these auto firms. I’ve even noted why U.S. auto firms shouldn’t be counted out. In light of Toyota’s current issues as told by its own former products liability attorney, Dimitrios Biller, issues narratively charted here under key developments, Michel Martin’s Tell Me More show yesterday featured Washington Post car columnist Warren Brown, who accused the media of habitually ignoring quality concerns at Toyota while standing ever ready to report any lapses in U.S. auto firms:

MARTIN:

So, are you suggesting that there has actually been this kind of quality problems all along and it’s just been ignored?

Mr. BROWN:

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m suggesting. I am suggesting that in this particular case…the media failed …because the media had anointed Toyota the quality leader because the domestic [auto firms] supposedly messed up so badly. …The media…tended not to look at Toyota the same way it would look at General Motors, Ford, [or] Chrysler.

And as you can see with the files I gave you, there were many reasons…to look at Toyota. But time and time again, if there was a problem with sludge in tanks, for example, a murmur from the media and it passed. If there were other problems, a murmur from the media, it passed.

Most interesting, however, was this comment, suggesting the sheer psychological power of a brand—like bigotry—to deny and reverse the customer’s perception of an unanticipated product feature thereby converting it to something affirming of their vested belief:

Mr. BROWN:

And there was even a mindset among many Toyota owners and they would call me and say I have problem A, B, and C with my Toyota. What am I doing wrong?

If someone with a GM or Ford vehicle would call with a similar problem, oh these expletive people, you know, they messed up again. I’m going to sue them, so forth and so on. And …that was the mindset… A lot of us who covered this industry knew for a long time that there were consumer complaints about braking, but we couldn’t really interest anybody in those complaints because they were complaints against Toyota.

When I worked in diesel engine manufacturing and talked to fleet customers over product planning, they never said, “Give us more electronics and doodads.” And these were people for whom driving productively paid the mortgage. And when we broached a doodad discussion, they shut it down. They didn’t care less about another sensor feed to the cockpit. In fact R&D seemed far more excited about the doodads than any customers ever were. I’m not saying you can’t lead customers—you can. I’m not saying you shouldn’t . You should.

But the customers said they wanted better accessories mounting. TRANSLATION:  access to the engine. They wanted to be able to work on the engine and they didn’t want to have to stand with their arm backwards in a V shape when they did. And don’t paint it black either, because they wanted to see things.

I wouldn’t have thought the three things  fleet customers told me more than a decade ago they didn’t want in an engine, would have become today’s automotive standard: more electronics and cockpit feeds, and black (boxed) engines with no access.  Increasingly, cars have become designed for the automakers:

• Try to find the battery in a new Mercedes.
• GM recently admitted that for years it based the undifferentiated auto interior design of its cars on the  ease of assembly for its workers.
• Truly protective rubber bumpers disappeared.
• I doubt any customers ever demanded cars that could parallel park themselves.
• They all have warranties which adversely affect quality and price; car brands long associated with reliability earned their reputations before warranties ever proliferated.

“Today’s cars, Toyota and any other car from any major automaker, essentially what they are are computers on wheels, computers with steering wheels. Computers can be and have been affected by electromagnetic pulses. As a matter of fact, one thing many automakers do, …is they go out to Ohio – which basically has … huge electromagnetic pulses, and they test the car to see if its …electronic functions are negatively affected by those pulses. And so its logical to assume that electromagnetic pulses may, in this case, certainly affect brakes that don’t rely on your traditional mechanical cables, but instead rely on sensors and other electronic materials.”—Warren Brown

I believe car customers today lack choices. “We’ve been had. We’ve been took. We’ve been hoodwinked. Bamboozled. “

got statistics?

Years ago I shared a probability problem with a Quantitative Analysis professor who used it as an introduction to a statistics course on the first day of classes. Here it is.

“Two Boys Problem”:

A man and a woman each have two children. The man and his children are not related to the woman and her children. If the woman’s older child is male and the man has at least one son, is the probability that the woman has two sons equal to the probability that the man has two sons?

In his class of brilliant overachievers of roughly 50 people, all agreed that the probabilities between the man and woman were equal–except for one lone dissenter whose hand slowly raised.

The lone dissenter was correct. Do you know why?

WARNING:
Sharing this problem can be animus inducing.

Business Logic: lessons from Phineas Gage

Business is a trading comps, SWOT-analyzed, SAS-crunched,  Access-tabulated, Porter forced, beta-calculated, Crystal Balled, Q-macroed, efficiently frontiered, clearing priced, Black-Scholesed, hypothesis tested world—supposedly, as business people well know and act on the knowledge that it is nothing if not a club. Still, how we think in business is believed to be logic based, objective and analytical. Even beyond business many describe their decision-making as squarely logical, tidily divorced, they often assure, from the “intrusion” of emotion.

But neuroscience has long since annihilated this assertion—that our reasoning is born of pure logic. To varying degrees several texts have presented the latest brain science, including Descartes’ Error and testimonially, Head Cases . Later treatments of the topic have been taken up in a now critical mass of literature, including the commercially successful Blink, and How We Decide and Gut Feelings.

It turns out that reason itself—that underlying our successes in business, planning, general goal achievement and successful human interaction—is a function of emotion. In fact, as neurologist Antonio Damasio reveals, our reasoning—from the mundane of deciding where to park to the complex of deciding where to attend college–actually requires emotion to even happen. We needn’t actively input emotion into decisions to enhance them, rather it is already there driving the very reasoning we have inaccurately concluded to be “pure logic.”

A fair portion of neuroscience breakthroughs stems from the “opportunity” afforded by traumatic brain injury and the subsequent study of patients.  The most famous patient in neuroscience remains Phineas Gage, through whose skull the pictured tamping iron got accidentally shot at high velocity, tearing away a large portion of the frontal cortex. Gage reportedly sat up and began talking after the accident. He survived. He could even compute.  But gone, as time revealed, were an emotional palette, socially sanctioned human interaction, faculties of judgment, and the reasoning required to decision-make, run a business, earn a living, plan a future and live a meaningful life. In fact, there are great examples of patients with traumatic brain injury and severely diminished capacities to function, whose I.Q.s remained in tact.  When connectivity is lost between the brain’s emotional seat in the amygdala, and its thoughtful seat in the frontal cortex, the human reasoning on which we depend is lost.

Well confirmed by numerous patient examples are a brain based, structurally defined interdependence—to the point of functional singularity—between what are still often mistakenly regarded as whole, independent spheres of reason and emotion. Undeniable is how value additive and fundamental to high decision making emotion can be; from our selection of marital partners to split second decisions about personal safety. In business, the testimony of whistleblowers in cases like Enron and WorldCom hardly resided cleanly outside the viscera. What kept whistleblowers up at night was not a cold P&L but a sick feeling about the P&L, one of the unshakable visceral cues that have evolutionarily been indispensible for premium human decision making and survival.

The No-Stats All-Star: what are we measuring

Measuring the obvious can be worse than easy—it can be pointless. Measuring the inobvious can illuminate. In a universe where change is constant, the degree to which measuring itself is questioned and refined—vs. capturing yet another easily captured metric, perhaps simply because new technology enables it—may be the most meaningful measure we make.

“Here we have a basketball mystery: a player [Shane Battier] is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.”

When he [Battier] is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse — often a lot worse….When [Kobe] Bryant is in the game and Battier is on him, the Lakers’ offense is worse than if the N.B.A.’s best player had taken the night off…“a marginal N.B.A. athlete” not only guards one of the greatest — and smartest — offensive threats ever to play … He renders him a detriment to his team.

“For most of its history basketball has measured not so much what is important as what is easy to measure — points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots — and these measurements have warped perceptions of the game. (‘Someone created the box score,” Morey says, “and he should be shot.’) How many points a player scores…is no true indication of how much he has helped his team. .. if you want to know a player’s value as a rebounder, you need to know not whether he got a rebound but the likelihood of the team getting the rebound when a missed shot enters that player’s zone.”—The No-Stats All-Star

Teams have magic because their composition yields properties different from the sum of its parts. Sometimes the sum is bigger and sometimes less. Sums are frequently bigger in business; in marriage and social circles; in sports; in academic research; in healthcare and in the performing arts. Sums can be less—in chemistry, two life sustaining elements like carbon and oxygen combine to make the poisons CO and CO2. Capturing the magic or subtraction—”emergent properties” as science calls them—isn’t always straightforward.

Control for talent in an organization: the work product produced in a high morale environment is entirely different from that produced in a low morale environment, by virtue of only the difference in the organization’s leadership. How useful then are statistics gathered on the workforce—in aggregate or individually—while under the wrong leadership?

I read with interest The No-Stats All-Star article earlier and think of it occasionally. It’s shared here for the timelessness of the point—the value not of more statistics, but of “meaningful” ones.